The present disclosure relates to user data access, and more specifically, to serialized data access.
One aspect of many modern computer systems is that they may use large numbers of physical, or virtual, input/output devices to allow sequential digital data archiving and back-up such as that required, for example, by government-mandated regulations or other business goals. Each of these systems may include a number of respective applications such that a variety of different applications are attempting to exclusively access the same input/output devices at any one time.
One approach to preventing corruption from occurring when data is being written to these input/output devices is to serialize access to the input/output devices. Such serialization can be accomplished using software on each of the computer systems that coordinate access to the input/output devices. In particular, respective requests to access one or more input/output devices from the various applications can be arranged in a queue such that allocation of the input/output devices occurs sequentially in the order of the requests in the queue. In this way, each request waits for the requests that are earlier in the queue to finish.